NEW Commander Deck Building Guide/Template - Make your EDH deck better

The color identity restrictions of EDH is the one thing that makes the decks both interesting and manageable to build. Like the stanzas of a poem, the beauty comes from how you work within the restrictions.

Youre the first person ive seen to give a concise and comprehensive framework on how to pick cards within each card category. Many thanks!

You are the adam warlock of EDH thanks for the guide

I've been playing magic on and off for years and the past year have found my love for it again. Your videos including this one has helped greatly in my thought process behind deck building and I look forward to more from this channel.

Thank you so much for your comments on boardwipes! While sometimes it might be necessary to completely wipe the board, it is more often better to play a board wipe which synergizes with your strategy. If you wipe the board but don't have an immediate strategy for winning, you have more than likely merely dragged out the game to be longer than it needed to be.

Evaluating ramp is really important for those higher costed commanders so you can leap frog your turns. If you play two mana ramp on turn 2, then your four mana ramp and six mana commander can actually come down on turns 3 and 4 respectively.

I think each commander should be analyzed individually and built in a way that seeks synergies and not using the same recipe for all decks. That's why when I saw the Command Zone "build template", I almost abandoned the video 😅😅 Really good video man. I found your channel few weeks ago and i like your content. Your videos are very interesting and your analisys are enough deep too keeping the interest with out boring. Great work. P..D Poor Cackling Fiend, you used like bad example. Because of you maybe he will stops laughing. 😢😂.

Awesome vid, been playing since og kamagawa :) but it’s good to refresh every now and then. My biggest pit fall is culling down to the 99. Adhd so bad I’m already starting on the next deck before the other is done.

Eh Idk about cutting single target removal. Might help you short term but when everyone catches up to that philosophy you're harming your pod overall. Because then everyone cuts removal and the strongest deck wins every time. It's a form of freeriding.

Woooooo i got lucky and got a Mondrak and have tons of token generating white cards and artifact cards! First magic games tomorrow after twenty years, wish me luck!

Please go over the new Precons!!! I'd love to see an upgrade guide from someone who cares about the game as much as you do! Thanks for the great vid.

This is a solid video! Couple points I'd like to add. 1. Think about the play pattern of your decks and the playstyle you like. Some days i want to play a high mental bandwidth deck with tons of instant speed options. Other days are better as using up all my resources only on my turn and effectively off on other's turns. This matters for color and deck building so much. 2. Its okay to have weaknesses in your deck. Staples are great, however the format is moving towards synergy focus. 3. Your deck has to be complimented by your commander, not completed. Even with weaker leaders, its a great mindset to build in functional synergy. Plus it will get removed more if its too much of the decks focus. 4. Please pick underused commanders. Everyone sees the big bads and boogeymen often. A pregame action of taking everyone's evil eye isnt good.

Great video, Tempest! Out of all the MTG content creators I’ve found, I think your philosophy on deckbuilding and playing is the closest to my own, and it’s really cool to have a mirrored perspective to help me review my lists and playstyle. Are you going to be at MagicCon Chicago next month?

I start a new deck with 40 lands. I HIGHLY recommend starting with 40 lands. It makes a huge difference in getting enough lands in your opening hand and the first few turns on the game. And if you want to cut a few lands later, no problem. My decks have 38 - 40 lands, including MDFC lands so it's really more like 36 - 38 pure lands. I used to have as few as 33 lands ... it worked sometimes but when I was not drawing enough lands, my opening game would be ruined. If being mana flooded later messes with your game, then just include a few lands you can cycle to draw a card.

Great breakdown! In my Lord Windgrace deck I run 42 lands and 69 in Soul of Windgrace, and they both are scary decks

I think when talking about ramp and card draw you can include a lot of effects that don't strictly ramp you in terms of lands/mana rocks and traditional card draw, depending on the flavor and style of the deck. I have a mono red Ragavan deck in which I have specifically replaced all the usual mana rocks with treasures, and all card advantage with either loot effects or cast from exile effects. This stays on theme with pirates and gives me a lot of efficient options in mono red. More often than not, I actually find land ramp spells off the top of the green players library. So while the treasures are temporary, they do allow me to play my pirates ahead of curve, which snowball to let me create even more treasures, and card advantage, while also lowering my opponents life total. There are unorthodox options available in every color if you are willing to dig around for them.

I super agree with taking out some single target removal. I see all these lists online “you need tp run this many lands, this many draw cards, this much ramp, this many lands, and you add it all up and you get like 70~ cards and it’s like “you guys really leave only about a third of your deck to your actual synergy?” I know some cards like soul shatter are removal but also synergize with commanders like tergrid, but still.

Thanks for this!

I have to contest the notion that it gets "more fun" to run less interaction. We have these commanders that the grassroots have dubbed "Monolith" commanders, and you can't let them sit while you dig for an answer, cause by the time you find it in your slimmed down interaction deck, they will have amassed so many resources that you might as well just scoop. A good example of this is a game I had the other week, against a Xyris deck. Xyris player ramps hard out of the gate, gets a few support pieces down on turn 3 and plays Xyris on turn 4, where he eat a removal spell right away. This player, however, had already ramped so hard that he could just recast it the next turn, with blue mana open, and no one had any more interaction. 3 turns later, when someone next managed to find a board wipe, the Xyris player had 25 lands in play, 30 cards in hand (including 3 board protection spells and 4 counterspells, 40 snakes on the board, and both Craterhoof and Beastmaster Ascension in hand. It was fucked, because this snake was allowed to stick around. Now, the reason I told this little story is to illustrate: If you don't want to be table top Hitler who tries to dictate what other people are allowed to play and not in your presence - Obviously not a great person to be or to be around - you have but one realistic recourse, unless you want to condemn yourself to only playing monolith commanders: To play more interaction. Interaction is the great equiliser that lets slightly more niche and less kitchen-sink'y commanders hang at tables where there may be monolith commanders as well.

New sub, happy to have found you on Youtube shuffle.